You wouldn’t think Jacqui Smith scares easily. In her time as Home Secretary she’s dealt with car bombs and blazing jeeps, and she’s lately been facing down a bunch of mightily annoyed cops. But in an interview appearing today in the Sunday Times, Jacqui revealed that she wouldn’t dare walk down a London street alone at night. Would she feel safe walking alone at night in, say, Hackney, east London? She looks alarmed: “No.......

Hello Jeff! But don't bother opening your mouth to reply, because I haven't got the time to listen; I'm too busy celebrating! No no, don't worry, you haven't missed St. Satan's Day. I'm celebrating because it's been a year since I started doing stand-up! You'll have to forgive me, as this may be quite a self-indulgent post. But I can scarcely believe I've managed to persevere for this long! You see, I'm a notoriously......

Just out the Van: Autumn is definitely upon us - time to start wrapping up at home with a good book. Or you could throw caution to the (nippy) wind and head to Book Slam next Thursday to bask in the warm glow of literati (gliterati?) including Sarfraz Manzoor (reading from his memoir "Greetings from Bury Park"), Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Netsayi, and poet Polar Bear... Next Thursday at Neighbourhood, £5/£6, 12 Acklam Road, W10 5QZ,......

Hello Jeff! I was recently involved in a conversation between two dear friends about the ethics of heckling. They each had deeply polar opinions on the matter, which were a follows: - Heckling is a monstrous and odious practice, performed exclusively by troglodytes and reprobates. Its villainy is matched only by genocide, and its purveyors on equal terms with Stalin. Those who heckle have, at best, a scant understanding about the nature of timing......

The second of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Andrew Boff. Victoria Borwick is a born and bred London lass whose Mayoral campaign carries the tagline 'A red head not Red Ken'. She has 25 years of management experience and is currently a councillor for Kensington and Chelsea. She has four children, doesn't like tinny techno and knows a thing or two about Cleopatra's Needle. But does she have the......

Hello Jack! I've not blogged here for a couple of weeks. Did you miss me? ...what do you mean you've forgotten that this column even existed? Damn your face, and all it stands for! Actually, that's nasty of me. I apologise profusely and unreservedly. You've got a lovely face, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, least of all David Milliband. It would be a terrible shame to cast your face asunder from the......

Buttoned Down Disco is fast becoming a London phenomenon. It's practially free if you sign up for the secret venue invite. More importantly, for a club night in London it's always really friendly. You could walk up to anyone and start talking to them if you felt like it. These are things we really don't see enough of on a typical London night out. But then, Buttoned Down Disco was never meant to be......

WWII bomb found in Bethnal Green. That's one way to free up land for the Olympics. Speaking of which...are we going to get a Ministry of Olympics? Paedophile! Living in a Watford playground! Thatcher opens Falklands exhibition at Imperial War Museum. And for all those people who've always wanted a BJ in a toga. Image (taken near Archway) courtesy of Marc Tobias Metten, who emailed it in especially. He tells us 'It's the most......

This week - Spiderman gets into more bother (Spiderman 3) and a film that features Avril Lavigne (Fast Food Nation). Peter Bradshaw begins his review of Spiderman 3 thus, Global warming continues. The magnolias are blooming obscenely early. The sky is an unseasonable blue. The burning sunshine seeds tiny flowers of skin cancer on our puckered flesh. And the long, hot summer of pointless film sequels is underway. In the coming months, it seems......

What's your name and which part of London do you live in? Ruth Sloss, South Ealing. How long have you been running for? About 4 years. Is this your first Marathon? Yes (gulp!). What inspired you to enter the Marathon? I started running thinking I couldn't get as far as the bus stop. Then once I got past it, I entered a 10K, then an 8 mile, then a half marathon, where I was......

Previous tales of the Mouse family can be found here, here , here and here. Continuing from previous episode... the Mouse family moved out of Newham Hospital, then to Asda, then moved into the Cheesegrater skyscraper, where Papa Mouse discovered that his son Tim-Tim and his wife Mama Mouse were lovers. In despair, Papa Mouse leapt to his death, then returned from the dead to win back the heart of Mama Mouse with an......

Lots of stuff to get through today, but we're starting small (sort of) with the immortalisation (sort of) of old favourite Tox as pictured above. Cheers to dr seagate for the link and photo. It's not quite the Tate Modern, but it's a (small) step in the right direction. More small wonders here and the press page features our favourite headline; Canaray Dwarf. Onto bigger things. Sherlock Holmes is making yet another comeback according......

Our weekly roundup of London blogs Our find of the week is The Greenwich Phantom, who writes daily about the goings-on in that borough of contrasts. And as phantoms go, he is vociferous. On the demolision of a Victorian building to make way for a new Terrance Conran pier. It couldn't possibly have been approved because it was designed by Conran could it? Honestly - what was Conran going to say? "No - you......

I reviewed Kristin Hersh's spellbinding album preview show at the Arts Theatre last time and on Tuesday night I got the opportunity not only to watch her perform a powerful acoustic set with The McCarricks but to meet her in person. We had quite a chat... First of all how are you, how are the shows going, are you enjoying yourself? I haven't had any shows really because it's a promo tour. I'm about......

More thrilling info on the silliest assassination in post-Cold War history: Apparently the very difficult-to-acquire (unless you're an evil research scientist, like in the movies), and very easy-to-trace (why not drown the fellow in Smart Water™?) Polonium 210, used to kill ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, is also extremely expensive. The Times declares the value of the Polonium used to poison Litvinenko at around $10 million. Why The Times does not give the value in......

A government official is interviewed about the villainous terrorist threat. In the background Christmas shoppers rush home with their treasures: "Deputy Minister, what do you think is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?" "Bad sportsmanship." Sorry. Got a little off track there. We at Londonist were recently rereading the screenplay for Brazil, one of our favorite movies. But in other news… Home Secretary John Reid tells us that it is highly likely the......

Ken announced over the weekend that he'd rather like to keep his job throughout 2012 just to keep an eye on this Olympics nonsense: "But when people get sick of me they will get rid of me. That's up to them. I am very keen to get through 2008 because I want to make sure we deliver the Olympics on time and on budget and get CrossRail under way. But I am sure that......

This week started well - Wednesday night was Regina Spektor at Shepherds Bush Empire. I'll be posting a proper gig review soon but let's just say she didn't disappoint, and proved even more alluring live than on record. For me gigging this week was all about the covers. The weekend saw another trek across the country to deliver rock and pop tunes to the party people, this time at a rather posh corporate do in......

Jeremy Clarkson is easy to dislike - we've used his snarling image for just about every congestion charge/traffic related post on Londonist - but he's also funny from time to time. Top Gear is hard to stomach unless you live in the fantasy land of wanting to own a new car every fortnight or get a thrill from the idea of standing in a garage looking at Clarkson's jean clad backside, but we're happy......

This day in London’s History 1966: Arrests at Vietnam Rally in Grosvenor Square. Some 4000 people gathered to protest against the Vietnam war and things turned violent as scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the US Embassy. The general secretary of the Communist Party, John Gollan, asked demonstrators to call it a day, but instead they knocked a police officer from his motorbike and set fire to petrol that leaked from the bike. This......

This week’s roundup includes the terrorist highjacking of a plane (United 93), a huge capsizing oceangoing liner (Poseidon) and, as if to save us from all this calamity, a couple of french policemen (36). Interesting the theme for this week's crop of reviews is consensus amongst the reviewers. As a result, if you can't be bothered to read the rest - United 93 is very good, Poseidon is very rubbish and 36 is slightly......

God forgive him... Andrew Lloyd Webber is bringing a new production of beloved musical The Sound of Music to the London Palladium in the West End this November. He hasn't trashed the original music by Richard Rodgers nor the lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein - we're quite certain God himself has enforced some sort of holy, invisible protective shield around classics such as "Climb Every Mountain" and "A Few of My Favourite Things." But he......

There's something about London's emergency services that creates great blogs. Random Acts of Reality has been stunning from the get go and is still going strong; World Weary Detective was similarly excellent (until it was forced to close); and if you haven't got Nee Naw in your bookmarks then shame on you. Nee Naw is home to Mark Myers, an Emergency Medical Dispatcher for the London Ambulance Service: If you were to walk into......

In the past few days a row has broken out between Britain and Russia over claims that our secret service used a covert transmitter disguised as a rock (pictured) to pass messages to agents. We here at Londonist are always eager to get to the bottom of these major stories, and it was with that aim in mind that we tracked down the rock in question (codename: Rocky) and conducted the following exclusive interview:......

- What are you going to do today, Brain? - The same thing I do every day, Pinky. Complain to London Underground. Get to tube station on time, in fact, early, meaning to get to work and knock off early. Discover that there are 'minor delays on the Hammersmith and City Line'. Wait. Train comes, packed to the gills (if trains had gills - do any land animals have gills? I believe grasshoppers and......

A girl I’ve been seeing is hosting a Halloween party with her flatmates. So of course this means fancy dress, right? The problem is I think Halloween is rubbish and I hate costumes. But I don’t want to be uptight about it. What should I wear that will impress the girl (and especially all her friends, whom I will be meeting for the first time) but won’t make me feel like a complete twat?......

Thursday afternoon in the Londonist dungeon, and the fetid air is filled with the sound of blistered and bloodied fingers tapping manically on keyboards. The Editor pokes his head out of his luxury climate-controlled office.... "Premiership Preview Bloke...in here. Now." "Yes boss?" "Your predictions are a disgrace." "But I got two right last week." "TWO?!? Hardly Alan Hansen is it? And your attempt to jump on the Chelsea backlash bandwagon was laughable. You missed......

Remember Freedom Bags? We had a post on them not so long ago, where we basically wrote them off as a not very good idea. In case you don't remember, the basic idea of Freedom Bags was to produce transparent rucksacks which commuters could use to prove they "were no threat". After the post, our friends over at the London Underground blog picked up on the whole Freedom Bags idea, and seemed to have......

I’m reluctant to admit this, but I’m still afraid to ride the Tube. I feel guilty about it because I wasn’t near the attacks and didn’t suffer as so many did. But I can’t stop being nervous whenever I leave my house. It seems like no one is as concerned as I am anymore and I would just like to get back to normal like everyone else, but I feel helpless. Everybody’s sense of......

"Zzzzzz... What? Eh? What have I missed?" If you've just woken up from Saturday's coma-inducing FA Cup Final, you've missed entirely nothing. One hundred and twenty minutes of the most turgid football ever witnessed at an FA Cup Final was followed by a penalty shoot-out which Arsenal won. There's not really a lot more to be said. On the balance of play Arsenal didn't deserve to win. They brought absolutely nothing to the game......